Every day Sheri Espinoza would dress, bathe and feed her mother. She helped her mom get to the bathroom, cleaned the house and made dinner.

When Lucy had medical appointments in Grand Junction, the 13-year-old girl would even drive her mother 40 miles to her doctor’s office.

Delta law enforcement officers knew their predicament and wouldn’t pull the girl over when they saw her driving her mother around, Lucy Espinoza said. She was too young to have a driver’s license.

“She had a lot of responsibility,” Lucy Espinoza said.

Sheri Espinoza was her youngest living child. One younger daughter had died shortly after birth and an older daughter, Sheila Ann, had fallen off a counter while working at a sugar beet farm and died, Lucy Espinoza said.

It would take years before Lucy Espinoza got the medical treatment she needed to get her back on her feet.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.